An appreciation of the Polish composer, best known for film scores such as
Francis Coppola's Dracula

The Polish composer Wojciech Kilar, who had been suffering from cancer, died aged 81 on 29th December in Katowice, the Silesian city where he spent most of his life. A contemporary of Górecki and Penderecki, he was a member of the Polish avant garde movement of the 1960s, but largely abandoned avant garde techniques in the filmscores for which he is now best known.

He started composing for films in 1959, but first made his mark in anglophone territories with his haunting symphonic score for Francis Coppola's Dracula (1992), his first music for an English language film.

Coppola's film, with its stylised imagery, was often exquisite, albeit (like many horror films made by A-list directors) not terribly scary. But Kilar's music - ominous, frequently chilling, but always melodic and also, at times, yearningly romantic - provided emotional depth that was missing from the mise en scène and some of the performances, and managed to tingle the spine where the rest of the film failed to do so.

Kilar went on to write three lovely scores for his countryman Roman Polanski - Death and the Maiden, The Ninth Gate and The Pianist, the last of which won a César (the French Oscar equivalent) and was nominated for a BAFTA. The Ninth Gate, in particular, is another spine tingler, the ominous sawing strings evoking the gathering of satanic forces, and the soaring voice of South Korean soprano Sumi Jo, in the Vocalise segment, striking a blissfully uneasy balance between beautiful and sinister.

Kilar also wrote scores for Jane Campion's The Portrait of a Lady (1996) and James Gray's We Own the Night (2007), as well as for a great many Polish films, including ones directed by Krzysztof Kieslowksi, Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Zanussi, who in 1991 made a biographical film about him.

Among Kilar's numerous non-film chamber and orchestral compositions are Krzesany, which was something of a classical hit in the 1970s, and an epic concert piece calledExodus, part of which was used for the trailer for Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, since John Williams' score for the film had yet to be completed.

For me, Kilar belongs to that select band of film composers whose music I will happily listen to repeatedly, even when I am nowhere near a cinema screen. Like the best film music, his work enhances any film to which it is attached, lending depth and emotional resonance, but it also stands and lives on its own.